Officials: Controls kept flood from being worse

Thursday, Sept. 11, 2003 | 10:45 a.m.

Regional flood officials and policymakers said this morning that the Aug. 19 deluge in northwest Las Vegas could have caused much more damage without control structures in place.

The storm caused an estimated $4.5 million in damage, much of it to homes along Gowan Road. Clark County Regional Flood Control District officials, including General Manager Gale Fraser, said the damage would have been more widespread and severe without $65 million in flood-control facilities already constructed throughout that area.

About $30 million more in control systems slated as part of the flood-control master plan for that area are expected to further reduce the impact of future floods.

"The system, according to everything we recorded, everything we've seen, worked," said Las Vegas Councilman Larry Brown, a member of the Flood Control District board. "Our capital program is doing its job ... There is still a lot of work to be done."

Brown said the flood water that raced from the west effectively blocked by U.S. 95. That water sought the lowest channel, which was Gowan Road, and eventually flooded residential areas.

Brown said some people may have been confused to see damage to homes on Gowan Road while flood control and Las Vegas Public Works officials said the Gowan detention basins, designed to hold billions of gallons of water, worked. Those detention basins dramatically cut off flood damage further east, but areas west of the basins still saw extensive damage.

The issue, according to officials who spoke at the district's regular board meeting Thursday, is that not all the structures to divert the water are in place.

Fraser said an Army Corps of Engineers study showed that with the planned structures in place, damage would have been reduced by 75 percent. The federal agency also modeled the same storm, which covered about 60 square miles of the valley with 3 inches of rain, in areas where the structures are already built. Again, the damage was about 75 percent less than without the structures.

Fraser said the district, about 15 years old, would have been closer to completing the planned control facilities throughout the northwest if it had been created earlier.

"Our job is flood control," he said. "It breaks our hearts that we hadn't finished building the flood control project that would have prevented damage."

Clark County Commissioner Bruce Woodbury, a district board member, said the storm last month and other desert floods show that the area "can get a 100-year storm," the design expectations for the Flood Control District, "every four or five years," at least somewhere in the valley."

"I think it's also clear that the efforts of the Flood Control District minimized or at least reduced the damage that occurred," Woodbury said.